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Baltimore County Delegate Jon Cardin wants to use a high-tech approach that would warn coaches and players about a problem as soon as it happens.

Head collisions in sports are usually brushed off or go unnoticed when they happen in a crowded field of play, but perhaps not for long.

One kind of football helmet is equipped with an impact sensor. It measures the direction of the hit, the acceleration of impact and how long it lasted. When these three things line up, it triggers a flashing red light to warn a coach, trainer or parent of potential risks.

"Thirty-nine percent of catastrophic brain injuries that happen in football, for example, happen to kids who are playing with concussions. So we have to figure out which kids have concussions so we can get them out of harm's way," said Greg Merril, CEO of Brainsentry.

Cardin introduced a bill establishing a sensor impact pilot program. Each local school district would distribute sensors to one football teams' athletes. The cost will be picked up by the sensor manufacturer.

"We are looking at ways to protect our children from major head impacts," Cardin said. "It's not to supplant the traditional ways to determine which kids need to come off the field."

"The sensors are behind the padding inside the helmet. The sensors transmit via a little transmitter to a side line alert monitor," said Thad Ide, senior vice president of Riddell. "This isn't a diagnostic tool. Whoever is holding an alert monitor on the side line just knows that something happened on the field that's out of the ordinary for that particular player or his skill level."